on gay marriage

My blog post of last week left a loose end over the issue of gay marriage - or, as the advocates would prefer, marriage equality for gay people.

It does seem to have become a terribly polarizing issue - but my reaction is to want the middle ground.

In America, reactions to calls for people to be allowed to marry others of the same sex have certainly fallen out on largely political partisan lines - though by no means all Democrats are on one side, and occasionally a brave Republican will break ranks to call for change.  In Britain, the Prime Minister (Conservative) recently suggested that having gay people marry each other was a thoroughly Conservative thing to do (since it tends to promote commitment, fidelity, stability; all [C]conservative values).  Much of his party might disagree.  Meanwhile, the Australian Prime Minister (Labor) seems  to regard the idea as anathema, whereas her party appears largely to accept the idea.

Churches seem largely to be opposed - but my gripe with the EA last week was of course that the reasons for this seem to have more to do with either the practice of homosexual sex (which is not immediately relevant to he question), or to a somewhat circular argument that "marriage is defined as the union of a man and a women, so two men cannot get married".  The bible largely takes man-women marriage as a given, but does not teach a great deal about it, and certainly doesn't set out to define it.

Undoubtedly, the first of those two positions is significant: it's a kind of rearguard action against society's broad acceptance of gay lifestyles.  It's as if some want to say "well, we lost the argument long ago, but we want to continue to express our dislike."  That's a powerful piece of prejudice, and leads to the rather curious argument which suggests that if gay people are married to each other this will somehow diminish the marriages of straight people.  I can't quite fathom why.  Undoubtedly, the aim is indeed to redefine the meaning of the word "marriage" to encompass more than it traditionally has.

There is additionally a red herring argument suggesting that whilst churches are not expected to be required to participate in solemnising marriages of gay people to each other (and, indeed, they may not be permitted to do so), some have thought that it will be only a matter of time before this is reversed, and equality laws will be invoked to force churches to act against their consciences.  To this we might say that firstly if equality law were being invoked, the difference between marriage and civil partnership would be irrelevant - and even less speculatively, every church (perhaps excepting the CoE) has the right to marry whomsoever it chooses and deny marriage to whomsoever it chooses, according to its own criteria. That seems unlikely to change.

So the naming issue seems crucial, at least in the UK context.  Civil Partnerships exist for gay people.  They've been around for several years, and quite a few thousand people have taken advantage of that opportunity.  Civil partnerships convey just about all the same rights and responsibilities upon those partnered and those who interact with them as civil marriages do.  And many, colloquially, talk of them with the same vocabulary as is used for marriage - wedding, husband, married, and so on.

So it seems to me that all we must ask is "what's in a name?".  To the gay community, I would have to ask whether it really matters what it says at the top of your certificate.  the difference between "marriage certificate" and "civil partnership certificate" doesn't seem so very great to me - especially when your friends and family can and will call it the first anyway. There are many areas in society where the official wording differs from the vernacular.

But the same argument works in the other direction: it really is just a change of name, so why should anyone get upset about it happening?  Of all the things to expend energy over, the use of one word instead of another seems among the most foolish.  To say "it can be a partnership but not a marriage" really doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you want to argue that civil marriage is somehow sacred (which sounds like a contradiction in terms).

So, essentially I see no particularly strong reason for a change, and no particularly strong reason to deny a change.  The difference is that making the change will make a few more people happy, and at least in their own judgement, reduce the total sum of iniquitous discrimination.  That, in itself, seems a good enough reason to support the change.